Hosting Tutorial & Guide

Wix VS iPage – Which is the Better Choice for High Performance Hosting?

This comparison is made between the premium plans from Wix and the shared hosting service from iPage, aimed at analyzing the services in detail and revealing the secrets behind them to help webmasters select the proper one according to specific demands and requirements.

The comparison is based on our review on the 2 companies' reputation, price, feature, ease of use, uptime, speed, advanced technologies, and technical support. According to the information we have collected, careful ratings are given to some of the important aspects. See details in the following table.

Price

Wix has 4 premium plans which are named as Connect Domain, Combo, Unlimited, and eCommerce. All of the plans support monthly and yearly billing, and the company is now offering discounts for the yearly billing ones. With the discounts, the price of the plans ranges from $4.08/mo to $16.17/mo.

For the primary Connect Domain plan, there is no free domain included, and what's even worse is that the company displays ads on those websites using this plan. The price is affordable, but the plan is not really good.

iPage has been offering an all-in-one shared hosting package with upgrade choices for VPS and dedicated servers. With an exclusive 76% discount applicable to visitors going through the promotional link below, the package is available from $1.99/mo only. 1 domain name and over $500 of advertising credits and hosting add-ons are included free of charge.

iPage Promotional Link Activation

Based on the facts discussed above, our summary on the comparison in price is that the service from iPage is actually much more affordable.

Basic Features

The basic web hosting features offered by Wix, according to our review, are quite limited. Even the highest level eCommerce plan only includes 20 GB storage and 10 GB bandwidth. In addition, except for eCommerce, the other 3 plans does not support shopping cart. For Connect Domain plan, there is only 500 MB disk storage and 1 GB monthly bandwidth, and the ads cannot be removed.

iPage, as a leading web host, provides a large number of features, including unlimited disk space and bandwidth, unlimited email accounts, many security features and multiple scripting languages. Besides, the company allows hosting unlimited domains on one account.

Ease of Use & Flexibility

As a popular website building platform, Wix makes it easy to build a website with its user-friendly website builder. The site builder is powerful, coming with beautifully designed templates, image galleries and social media integration. However, the problem is that customers are not allowed to install and use any other third-party open source applications like WordPress independently.

iPage offers a site builder, too. Named Weebly, the builder is also easy-to-use, having been recognized as one of the best products in the field. The use of Weebly is optional, which means that customers can choose this tool to get a website started, or they can feel free to install any other CMS on the server to build a rich-featured website as they want.

Performance

Both of the 2 companies guarantee 99.9% uptime, and as we have monitored, the real records are satisfactory. Wix has achieved 99.90% uptime in the past 30 days, and iPage has reached 99.95%. Judging from the statistics, we find that both of them are reliable choices. Read the following chart for the real-time monitoring results of iPage.To get real statistics about the speed, we have been monitoring several servers of the 2 companies to check out their server response time. As a result, iPage takes 560ms, which is much faster than its competitor which consumes 750ms. According to our analysis, the main reason should be that the winner utilizes a pooled server environment which gets FTP, websites and emails running on their own servers to improve performance.

Technical Support

Wix offers a large support center which contains written tutorials and video tutorials on account, domain, email, and so on. Besides, there is a forum for customers to post their questions. However, the company does not offer any direct and instant access to the support team which can only be reached via the forum.

Different from Wix, iPage provides not only an extensive help center with knowledgebase and user guide, but also 24x7 US based expert powered support service via live chat, phone and email, so customers can choose any of the methods to get a real human helping with the problem instead of waiting for hours in user forum.

Which Is the Better Choice?

We personally hold the opinion that iPage is much better for hosting blogs, ecommerce sites, small business sites and image sites, for it offers better features, flexibility, performance and technical support. In fact, this company has a fairly high reputation. To learn why, read iPage review on some other reliable review sites.

We've been an independent web hosting review site, and have reviewed 200+ web hosts since 2006 - trying to help web masters find the best hosting deals based on the budget and requirement, including shared web hosting, VPS hosting, reseller hosting and dedicated servers.